Think before you shout

There’s good news and bad news about the donnybrooks that have erupted at town hall meetings around the country during this Congressional recess. The good news is that people are deeply enough engaged in their democracy to get out and meet with their lawmakers. The bad news is that many are not using the opportunity to enter into dialogue, but to see to it that no dialogue is possible.

As high as emotions ran at Monday’s meeting hosted by Pennsylvania representative Chris Carney, we were happy to note that nobody shouted anyone else down. But the nationwide phenomenon of “screamers” at public meetings provides an opportunity to reflect on the importance of freedom of speech, why we need it and how we can abuse it.

There is a reason freedom of speech is protected in the very first amendment in the Bill of Rights. Because the conveyance and discussion of information is the basis for intelligent decision making, no nation that is a democracy can survive without it. To that extent, it would make things easy if we could think of free speech as an absolute, any type of which, anywhere, any time, ought to be protected in the United States.

In practice, the Supreme Court has not been quite so permissive. The best-known limitation was articulated by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes when he wrote in Schenck vs. the United States that “a man falsely shouting fire in a theater” is not protected by the First Amendment, a restriction later refined to apply only to cases in which the speech is intended to, and likely to, incite imminent lawless action.

But for the most part, the Supreme Court has been extremely broad in its interpretation of what counts as free speech. Not only verbal language, but actions that are deemed to be expressive, like burning flags or creating non-verbal artworks, have been deemed protected. Even the action of donating money by corporations to political campaigns has been ruled to be free speech.

People on both the right and the left sometimes question where the court draws the line. The left would like to exclude corporate donations, the right, flag burnings. Both those objections could be met if free speech were legally limited to cases of verbal expression. One might even consider going to the extreme of including only language that consists of assertions of fact or reasoning, which would leave out purely emotive language like the hurling of insults.

But drawing the line between what does and does not count as free speech starts us down a very slippery slope, and we would hesitate to ask for changes in the legal definition for fear of losing more than we gain. But even without changes in law, it is fair to encourage all those who speak at venues like town meetings to ask themselves: am I furthering the conversation on which democracy depends or stopping it in its tracks? Because that is what determines whether an utterance adheres to the spirit, as well as the letter, of the Constitution.

It is in this context that the behavior of some of the mobs that have descended on meetings on health care reform lately clearly goes over the line.

To be sure, even under the strictest standards outlined above, the utterances of the so-called “screamers” have to be accepted as Constitutionally protected. They are mostly verbal (excluding a few hung effigies and painted swastikas) and frequently consist in assertions of (purported) fact. Even shouting “liar” at a congressman, as expressing the belief that the congressman is a liar, ought to be protected in a democracy.

But if, for example, “liar” is repeated numerous times and used to shout down others who are trying to be heard, it is not an exercise of one person’s right to speak but an attack on someone else’s right. One far more constructive alternative might be to read a section of one of the bills that proves that what the congressman says is untrue. The fact that the “screamers” frequently shout “read the bill,” without reading the troublesome portions to us, can only foment suspicions that there are no such quotes to be read.

So we challenge the town hall meeting attendees: Are you using the opportunity to make your point or abusing it to prevent others from doing so? Are you adding information to the conversation or only your anger? And if there are a lot of other people throwing anger, not information, into the pot, at what point are you “shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theater” even if you don’t actually intend to incite violence?

If we are truly interested in living in a democracy and handing one down to our children, we ought to think carefully about the answers to these questions before we speak—and most especially, before we shout.

Also in this issue:

• Letter to the DRBC on water withdrawal

Dr. Punnybone

It Won't Let You Down